Warnings on Cigarette Packs May Keep Ex-Smokers From Relapse

Warnings on cigarette packages about the health hazards of smoking can help deter many ex-smokers from lighting up again, a new international study finds. The findings may be especially timely for policymakers in the United States, since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is poised to mandate graphic anti-smoking images on cigarette packaging in September. One expert said he believes smokers and ex-smokers need more reminders of the ravages of smoking. "I keep an empty package of cigarettes at hand when talking to smokers, and ask them if they look at the warnings," said Dr. Len Horovitz, pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "While most say that they do, they cannot repeat more than two health risks -- usually lung cancer and emphysema are the responses."

 Horovitz believes that more prominent warnings -- especially about non-lung-cancer conditions such as heart disease, bladder cancer and erectile dysfunction -- would help more ex-smokers stay that way. The new findings, published April 25 in the journal Tobacco Control, are based on a poll involving about 2,000 former smokers in Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States. The content and graphic nature of cigarette-package warnings varies widely between these countries, the authors noted. Regardless of nationality, however, the survey found a common trend: ex-smokers who said they found anti-smoking messaging on packaging helpful were more apt to avoid relapse. 

"This study provides the first evidence that health warnings can help ex-smokers stay quit," researchers led by Dr. Ron Borland of the VicHealth Centre for Tobacco Control at the Cancer Council Victoria in Carlton, Australia, said in a journal news release. The team believes the anti-smoking messages "help generate reasons for resisting temptations to relapse."

 In the United States, public health messaging on cigarette packaging is now the subject of considerable debate and potentially dramatic change. The FDA has already approved plans to overhaul the packaging of all cigarettes sold in the United States by replacing text-only warnings (in place since 1984) with extremely graphic cautionary images, some of which depict smoking-related disease.